“Any evangelical leader — by which I mean someone like a minister or
an elder — who voted for Obama the second time, is not qualified for the
office he holds, and should resign that office,” Wilson wrote in an
Oct. 14 blog post.
“Unless and until he repents of how he is thinking about the challenges
confronting our nation, he should not be entrusted with the care of
souls.”

Wilson, who’s known for his books on Christian theology and his debates
on religion with the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, suggested there
may be other reasons why supporting Obama could disqualify church
leaders, but he said he’d focused primarily on the president’s “radical
pro-abort position.”

Drawing a link between Margaret Sanger, the Planned Parenthood founder, and the then-respectable eugenics movement she aligned herself
with to promote contraception use in the early 20th Century, Wilson
singled out black officials who supported Obama as particularly
ill-suited to lead congregations.

“Not only must the dignity of human life be upheld by white and black
Christian leaders alike, to the extent we may allow any differences, it
should be to expect a greater vehemence in opposing abortion (in the
person of its advocates and enablers) from black leaders,” Wilson wrote.
“This is because it is their people who are being disproportionately
targeted by the white Sangerites. And a black Christian leader who
cannot identify a Sangerite is a rabbit leader who does not know what a
hawk looks like.”

It's not just about abortion -- the right is locking up women when it deems them a threat to their fetuses

It is no secret that this has been a banner year for laws
attempting to recriminalize abortion. During the first six months of
2013, states adopted 43 provisions to ban abortion, impose medically unnecessary restrictions on providers or otherwise regulate the procedure into nonexistence.

But
framing the current assault on reproductive rights exclusively in terms
of abortion rights erases another, equally dangerous reality faced by
women who intend to carry their pregnancies to term: laws that establish
personhood for fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses aren’t just a
threat to women’s access to abortion — they are also being used to
criminalize and incarcerate pregnant women.

“The arguments being used to support the
recriminalization of abortion not only have implications for the
reproductive rights of women who want to continue their pregnancy to
term,” Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for
Pregnant Women, told Salon. “The impact will be — the impact has already
been — to deny pregnant women their very personhood. What’s at stake is
not just reproductive rights, but virtually every right we associate
with constitutional personhood.”

The available data on punitive state actions against pregnant women more than bears this out.

According to research compiled by NAPW,
between 1973 and 2005, there have been 413 documented cases in which a
woman’s pregnancy was a necessary factor in criminal charges brought
against her by the state. In these cases and the 200 others that have
been documented since 2005, women have been deprived of due process, the
right to legal counsel, freedom of movement and other basic
constitutional protections simply because they were pregnant.

In September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published
the first part of its review of the latest climate science, the AR5
report. What makes the IPCC unique is that it is not the voice of a
single scientist, or even that of a group. It represents a combined
view of in this case 209 lead authors and a further 600 contributing
authors. That is 809 scientists from all around the world, calmly
setting out the data as they observe it. They observe that since the
1950s, many of the changes to our climate are unprecedented over the
previous decades and in some cases millennia. They observe that the
atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have
diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse
gases have increased. They observe that each of the last three decades
has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding
decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983-2012 was likely the
warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years. Just after the report
came out many business leaders urged immediate action from governments,
businesses and society to reduce carbon emissions and increase
resilience. They were right to do so.

Climate change is sometimes misunderstood as being about changes in
the weather. In reality it is about changes in our very way of life.
Climatic shifts on the scale suggested by our current emissions
trajectory could wreak havoc with the global agricultural system. 2
degrees of average warming could still mean several times that in the
world's temperate regions, where much of the world's food is grown.
Changing patterns of rainfall could increase the volatility of global
crop yields as more countries experience doubts and floods that can wipe
out whole harvests in the blink of an eye. All this during a period in
which we expect the world to welcome an additional 2 billion people.
The arithmetic doesn't add up. The gains in prosperity that many in the
world have enjoyed over the past century of growth and industrialization
could be severely curtailed if we do not change path urgently towards a
more sustainable future. That is to say nothing of the more
devastating effects of rising sea levels on the millions of people who
live in low lying coastal regions and the prospect of hundreds of
millions of environmental refugees that may be created if we do not act
now.

Governments' ambitions to limit warming to 2°C now appear
increasingly more difficult: in 2012 PWC estimated that the required
improvement in global carbon intensity to meet a 2°C warming target had
risen to 5.1% a year from now to 2050 - a rate of decarbonization not
achieved since World War Two. But every year of delay will increase
emissions, lock the economy into a high carbon future and make future
emissions reductions more costly. The world must therefore act in a
swift and coordinated way to avoid the more pessimistic scenarios of 4°C
or even 6 °C average warming above pre industrial levels.

But faced with all this we have no choice but to be optimistic. It
is often when most challenged that the human species can surprise us
most. As we head towards the UN climate negotiations (UNFCCC COP19)
that kick off on 11 November in Warsaw we have to focus on three things;
Understating what is possible, showing what is possible and doing what
is possible.

Growing demand amid unstable temperatures is creating a deficit, a new report warns

Morgan Stanley Research has successfully alighted on a way to throw
the Internet into a panic: A report released Monday by the firm cautions
that we may be on the precipice of a global wine shortage.

2.8
billion cases of wine per year may not be enough to keep the world
happily buzzed on antioxidants, according to the analysis, which found
that heavy drinking combined with a 5 percent fall in global production
has left us 300 million cases shy of the amount needed to meet demand.Last year’s drop in production can be partly attributed to
unstable weather in Argentina and Western Europe. A combination of
weather damage and disease, for example, contributed to a fall in
France’s stocks of wine to their lowest level in over a decade.

And as climate change worsens, we could be seeing more of this sort of thing. A study from earlier this year warned that
traditional wine country regions — including the Bordeaux and Rhone
regions in France, Tuscany in Italy and Napa Valley in California and
Chile – will experience sharp declines in production by 2050. Writing
for LiveScience,
wine expert and University of Maryland researcher Antonio Busalacchi
explained his own findings that “extreme events, such as heat waves that
shut down photosynthesis and hail storms that can ruin a chateau’s
annual production in a matter of minutes, will become more commonplace.”
Aside from lowered stocks, he said, wines will also lose their
traditional character.

Industry across the nation is looking to see what Colorado voters are going to do.'

Lauren McCauleyPublished on Wednesday, October 30, 2013 by Common DreamsIn what many are calling the new "ground zero" in the national fight
against fracking, the toxic gas and oil extracting process is on the
ballot in four Colorado towns where citizens are taking on the
heavyweights of the fossil fuel industry.

Following the example of Longmont, which last year
became the first Colorado city to ban fracking, next Wednesday, voters
in Boulder, Broomfield, Lafayette and Fort Collins will have the
opportunity to choose whether or not they support the controversial
extraction method of shale oil and gas in their communities.The Denver Business Journal provides this rundown of the four ballot measures:

Broomfield: Question 300 would impose a five-year prohibition on all fracking.

Fort Collins: Its measure would create a five-year moratorium on
fracking and storage of waste products related to the oil and gas
industry in town.

City of Boulder: 2H proposes a five-year moratorium on oil and gas exploration.

Lafayette: Question No. 300 would ban new oil and gas wells in town.
[As well as] prohibit "depositing, storing or transporting within city
limits any water, brine, chemical or by-products used in or that result
from extraction of oil and gas.”

Though local ballot initiatives, these are no small-town battles.
According to reports, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA) has
poured over $600,000 into campaigns against the moratoriums."The oil and gas industry is trying to intimidate voters by spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy this election," Laura
Fronckiewicz, campaign manager for the pro-moratorium group Our Broomfield, toldDenver Westword.

Among those industry insiders who are concerned that the success of
these local initiatives could spell trouble for the future of fracking
in the west, Tim Wigley, president of oil and gas trade group Western
Energy Alliance, said,
“I’ve really beat the drum with our members [...] across the West about
how dangerous a precedent these could be if they become law.”

Several months ago, scientists warned that tiny microbeads, a common ingredient in facial cleansers, were flowing into the Great Lakes, with no way to remove the potentially harmful plastic. Now, a new study provides evidence of the microplastics in the world's largest surface freshwater source -- and gives scientists a fighting chance to get microbeads out of consumer products.

"We found high concentrations of micro-plastics, more than most ocean
samples collected worldwide," said Marcus Eriksen, who has a doctorate
in science education and was the lead author on the paper. Eriksen is
the co-founder executive director of 5 Gyres, a nonprofit that studies
aquatic plastic pollution.

Scientist used a manta trawl
(essentially, a net) to collect samples from 21 points in lakes Erie,
Huron and Superior. All but one contained plastic. Much more plastic was
found in Lake Erie, the most populated of the three lakes. Two of its
eight samples, downstream from Erie, Pa., Cleveland, Ohio and Detroit,
contained 85 percent of all the microplastic particles collected in the
entire study.
At one point, they found 466,000 particles per square kilometer, with an
average of 43,000 particles per square kilometer. Most of these
particles, which are used in bath products to scrub skin and are meant
to wash down the drain, are less than one millimeter in size.

The legislation aims to avoid the religious constrictions placed on
marriage for straight couples, as well as to provide benefits to
same-sex couples.

Israel does not currently allow any civil unions, and according a New
York Times report, experts have estimated that over recent years, a
quarter of Jewish couples have left Israel to marry, or cohabit without
marrying.

The 15-page legislation, introduced in the Knesset on Tuesday, avoids
using the word “marriage”, but would allow equal benefits for those
entering the civil unions. The legislation specifies the unions as
between “two human beings”, therefore making same-sex couples eligible.

“We have no argument or clash with the religious establishment, but
we do need to provide a civic solution for every person, Jew or non-Jew,
gay or straight,” Yair Lapid, Israel’s finance minister and chairman of
Yesh Atid, said in a statement. “One of the fundamental human rights is
the right to love in any way that one sees fit.”

On October 3, a few weeks after celebrating their 16th anniversary as a
couple, Vic Holmes and Mark Phariss of Plano walked into the Bexar
County Clerk's Office to apply for a marriage license. Their request was
was denied, as they knew it would be. Same-sex marriage is still banned
under the Texas Constitution.

Though Holmes and Phariss failed to obtain a marriage license, they
succeeded in gathering ammunition for a federal lawsuit they filed on
Monday in federal court seeking to lift the ban.

"Any person has the legal right to marry another person of the
opposite sex, but that right is denied to those citizens who wish to
marry another person of the same sex," the complaint says. "This unequal
treatment of gay and lesbian citizens is based on longstanding
prejudices, and it is repugnant to the United States Constitution."

The court filing proceeds to give a thumbnail sketch of Holmes and
Phariss' relationship, as well as that of Cleopatra De Leon and Nicole
Dimetman, a lesbian couple from San Antonio who are co-plaintiffs in the
suit.

Holmes was in the Air Force and stationed in San Antonio when he met
Phariss, an attorney, in 1997. They moved in together after dating for
several months but were forced to live apart when Holmes was stationed
in San Diego for training to be a physician's assistant.

They continued their relationship long-distance for the next 11
years, only reuniting under the same roof when Holmes retired from the
Air Force in 2010. Soon after, they decided to get married.

De Leon was also in Air Force, though her four years of active duty
were over by the time she met Dimetman in 2001. They lived together and
supported each other while De Leon completed grad school and while
Dimetman finished law school. They married in Massachusetts in 2009 and
De Leon gave birth to a child three years later, but they are denied the
federal and state benefits that accrue to married couples because Texas
won't recognize their union.

“Did
you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism
continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing
in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman
wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your
answer must have been that it is because the people support those
institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”

Berkman
was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify
global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our
corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the
institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The
battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the
corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans
are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power.
They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished
civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security
and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in
poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not
overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

It
appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is
incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing
their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising
to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated
into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left,
knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of
anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular
revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a
question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.

Revolution
usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be
considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once
the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an
insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or
movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption
will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain
now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state
to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the
abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic
unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is
crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and
widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.

“Because
revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real
revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,”
Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how
quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the
fire is.”

A
Nevada Republican sparked outrage after he told members of the GOP that
he’d bring back slavery if that’s what his constituents wanted. Nevada
Assemblyman Jim Wheeler made the comments to the Storey County
Republican Party in August, according to the Associated Press. A video of his remarks only recently surfaced, though YouTube copies of the video appear to have been taken down.

In
2010, when Wheeler was running for his seat, a conservative blogger
wrote an article where he asked the question, “what if those citizens
decided they want to, say, bring back slavery? Hey, if that's what the
citizens want, right Jim?” Wheeler told the crowd in August that he
responded to the blogger, “yeah, I would.”

Wheeler
added: “If that's what they wanted, I'd have to hold my nose ... they'd
probably have to hold a gun to my head, but yeah.”

Elected
officials from both parties furiously denounced his comments.
“Assemblyman Wheeler's comments are deeply offensive and have no place
in our society. He should retract his remarks and apologize,” said the
governor of the state, Brian Sandoval.

The Democratic caucus in the Nevada Assembly called Wheeler’s remarks “reprehensible and disgusting.”

Wednesday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow
discussed the increasing explicitness with which tea party Republicans
are embracing the Confederacy-era South as their cultural touchstone.

Maddow began the segment by discussing the conservative women’s group
the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW) and their 2010
conference in Charleston, SC, in which attendees were promised “A
Southern Experience” by the South Carolina branch of the organization.

“And boy did they mean that!” said Maddow. “They meant a very specific kind of ‘Southern Experience.’”

She
then showed photos of the event, which featured white attendees dressed
in Confederate regalia and African-American people dressed as slaves.
The individual dressed as a Confederate officer in the image is South
Carolina’s now-Lieutenant Governor Glenn McConnell, who in 2010 was
still just a state senator.

In South Carolina, it is apparently good for your political career to
be seen doing Civil War reenactments, complete with slaves.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), shortly after being sworn in,
elected to celebrate Confederate History Month. Unlike past governors,
however, he did not mention or make any note of the issue of slavery.

“After a while, after a national kerfuffle,” said Maddow, “McConnell
did finally get embarrassed and went back to the commemoration statement
and added a reference to slavery.”

Young white supremacists gather in D.C. to talk Ayn Rand, race and IQ, economic collapse. We crash the sad event

In the basement of Washington’s Ronald Reagan building this
Saturday, 100 or so preppy white folks gathered to talk about their
disgust with modernity and their embattled race. The room felt like a
bunker, windowless and cramped.

Near the White House, the men —
and handful of women — bought books about the IQ differences between
races and listened for nearly nine hours, as speakers from the U.S.,
Switzerland and France carried on about their shared European heritage,
the impending financial collapse and the absurdity of believing all men
are born free and created equal.

“God did not give people
inalienable rights any more than he made them all equal and it is just
the silliest kind of thing,” said Sam Dickson, an attorney who has spent
decades supporting ultra-right-wing causes from Holocaust denial to
Confederate revisionism. “That kind of thinking to the brain is like
cotton candy to the stomach as compared to roast beef.”

The
conference, titled “After the Fall: The Future of Identity,” was an
opportunity to vent about a world that “has begun to crack and splinter
under the pressure of mass immigration, multiculturalism and the natural
expression of religious and ethnic identities by non-Europeans,” an
online announcement explained. The conference comes as much of the white
separatist movement is coalescing in opposition to Congress’ push for
comprehensive immigration reform.

The host was the National Policy
Institute, a quasi-think tank “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and
future of European people in the United States, and around the world.”
In sessions, speakers carried on about “The God That Failed,” “The
Children of Oedipus,” the “Question of Identity.”

“We want to
change the world,” NPI leader and conference organizer Richard Spencer
announced to his people. “We feel we are at the end of a certain
paradigm and we want to take part in creating a new one.” The
conference, in essence, was an opportunity for paranoids to hold a
planning session/pep rally for their long-awaited economic or cultural
collapse.

For the most part it was pretty small-bore stuff. In the
lobby outside of the Polaris room, young men debated whether Ayn Rand’s
message of individualism served the white race or fragmented it.

During a coffee break, a discussion about whether whites of different ancestry could ever live together in an ethno-state erupted from one of the tables.

I feel hostility every time I walk out my door in Front Royal, Virginia.

This afternoon I found myself getting all teary eyed. I was playing
the 1988 Dianne Reeves song “Better Days” for my two and a half year old
son Julien. It’s the song that begins”

“Silver gray hair neatly combed in place.

There were four generations of love on her face.

She was so wise, no surprise passed her eyes…” Sometimes referred to as “The Grandma Song,” this tune about her
grandmother’s last years is way too sentimental for my tastes, but
somehow Reeves sings the sappiness right out of the joint. Or at any
rate, she sings it so well that I don’t care anymore, and I let loose
with exactly the sort of feeling the song means to convey. In other
words, listening to “Better Days” almost always gets me teary eyed—or
worse; and halfway through the song this afternoon I was about to take
that emotional turn for the worse. Just a little earlier, Julien and I had left Maggie and Heather at
the Royal Horseshoe Farm over on Morgan Ford Road toward the edge of
Front Royal, the small town where we live in Virginia’s Shenandoah
Valley. Maggie—Heather’s and my nine-year old daughter—was there for her
classmate Annalee’s birthday, and I was considering staying at the
party with her and Heather. Which, I must say, was kind of odd. We’ve been to some of Annalee’s previous parties, and though her
parents have always been friendly, a good number of their friends and
relatives were another story. Unlike Annalee’s parents, they weren’t the
sort to extend their southern hospitality to strangers – especially not
a mixed couple like Heather and me. At the last party, many of them refused even to acknowledge us the
entire time. I recognized one young woman as the clerk behind the
counter the one time I took Maggie to the local ice cream shop. It was
one of the situations where I open the front door of a place, everyone’s
smiling and laughing until they take a look at me, standing in the
entrance looking, to them, like an uppity foreigner, an illegal alien,
or maybe even a terrorist. Whatever it was they saw in Maggie and me, it
made them turn completely silent. Sometimes it’s hard to decide which is worse—when they refuse to look
at you because they don’t want to acknowledge your existence, your
presence, in what they believe is a world that should belong only to
them; or when they do look at you, and look at you with the purpose of
sending the message that you don’t belong here and that you’re an
intruder who better watch his fucking step. One might think, at first,
that invisibility is always preferable, because it precludes the
possibility that acts of violence may be taken against you.

By Luke Johnson
Posted: 10/29/2013
Speaking five years after the financial crisis began, Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Mass.) rejected that affordable housing mandates for Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis.
"While the crisis was massive and painful -- and its impact continues
to weigh on middle-class families to this day -- its underlying cause
was fairly clear," she said, in remarks to the Mortgage Bankers
Association’s 100th Annual Convention & Expo in Washington. "The
GSEs [government-sponsored enterprises] made significant mistakes --
mistakes that cost taxpayers dearly -- but those mistakes were not the
underlying cause of the crisis."

"Although Fannie and Freddie purchased securities backed by subprime
loans, and some of those purchases helped fulfill their affordable
housing goals, the St. Louis Fed economists found that the housing goals
had no impact -- no impact -- on either the number of subprime loans
originated or the price of those loans in the private-label market," she
said. "Affordable housing goals have been scapegoated by those who have
been itching to get rid of the goals for a long time, but I think it’s
time to drop that red herring."

Warren blamed Fannie and Freddie's mistakes -- they have cost taxpayers $187 billion since being taken under government conservatorship in 2008 -- on trying to make increased profits to please shareholders.

The study Warren was referring to refuted a common conservative argument blaming the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act
for forcing Fannie and Freddie to buy shoddy mortgages in poor
neighborhoods. "It was the federal government that pushed the subprime
loans … that pushed the Community Reinvestment Act," said Rep. Michele
Bachmann (R-Minn.) in a GOP primary debate during her presidential
campaign, when asked who was to blame for the financial crisis.

Cities exist to promote culture. But gentrification is destroying this vital role.

Nato Thompson: Gentrification is a topic you have
written about quite extensively in regard to that city on the Bay, San
Francisco. It’s also a strange word in that it hints at not only a
spatial transformation, but a cultural one as well (in terms of race and
class). How do you see that mutable thing called culture playing out in
cities and what value does it possess?

Rebecca Solnit: Culture is not only economically
beneficial to cities; in a deeper sense, it’s what cities are for. A
city without poets, painters and photographers is sterile—it’s a suburb.
It doesn’t contain the mirrors of its own inner workings, in the form
of creativity, criticism or cultural memory. It’s undergone a lobotomy.

It’s important to add that the people who blame artists for
gentrification imagine artists as white middle-class newcomers to
neighborhoods; but there are long-term culture-makers from the
underclass that matter. Art comes in all colors: think of the Mission
District’s muralists, the gospel choirs of the Fillmore or hip-hop in
the South Bronx, just for starters.

Most politicians, businessmen and economists, and many urban
theorists, present cities as machines of capital, now that industrial
production has been shipped off to the Third World, or sometimes
American exurbs and suburbs. But cities, for me, are the brain of a
society. They’re made for dreaming and imagining in ways that might not
be so viable, or might just be lonely, in towns or villages. Big cities
become refugee centers for people who are weird and innovative.

The reversal of postwar white flight ultimately led to the
suburbanization of the city. Look at downtown San Diego, which has
supposedly been “reinvigorated” (to use a bit of urbanist jargon)—it’s
dominated by chain stores and condos that are often second homes for the
rich. There’s another problem. Cities used to provide poor people with a
place—even if it was just a tenement. Now if you fall below the middle
class, you won’t find the working-class boarding houses of the 1930s.
Instead, you’ll fall into homelessness. There’s this novel phenomenon of
homeless people who are employed, sometimes even in white-collar jobs.

Will Obama Block the Keystone Pipeline or Just Keep Bending?

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.comAs the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline
has worn on -- and it’s now well over two years old -- it’s illuminated
the Obama presidency like no other issue. It offers the president not
just a choice of policies, but a choice of friends, worldviews, styles.
It’s become an X-ray for a flagging presidency. The stakes are sky-high,
and not just for Obama. I’m writing these words from Pittsburgh, amid
7,000 enthusiastic and committed young people gathering to fight global warming, and my guess is that his choice will do much to determine how they see politics in this country.

Let
us stipulate at the start that whether or not to build the pipeline is a
decision with profound physical consequences. If he approves its
construction, far more of the dirtiest oil
on Earth will flow out of the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and reach
the U.S. Gulf Coast. Not just right away or for a brief period, but far
into the future, since the Keystone XL guarantees a steady flow of
profits to oil barons who have their hearts set on tripling production
in the far north.

The history of oil spills and accidents offers a
virtual guarantee that some of that oil will surely make its way into
the fields and aquifers of the Great Plains as those tar sands flow
south. The greater and more daunting assurance is this, however:
everything that reaches the refineries on the Gulf Coast will, sooner or
later, spill into the atmosphere in the form of carbon, driving climate
change to new heights.

In June, President Obama said
that the building of the full pipeline -- on which he alone has the
ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down -- would be approved only if “it
doesn’t significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” By
that standard, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get.

These
days, however, as no one will be surprised to hear, brainless things
happen in Washington more often than not, and there’s the usual parade
of the usual suspects demanding that Keystone get built. In mid-October,
a coalition that included Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal
Dutch Shell, not to mention the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National
Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, sent Obama a
letter demanding that he approve Keystone in order to “maintain investor confidence,” a phrase almost guaranteed to accompany bad ideas. A report
last week showed that the Koch brothers stood to earn as much as $100
billion in profits if the pipeline gets built (which would come in handy
in helping fund their endless assault on unions, poor people, and
democracy).

We’ve
clearly triggered the types of positive feedbacks the United Nations
warned about in 1990. Yet my colleagues and acquaintances think we can
and will work our way out of this horrific mess with permaculture (which
is not to denigrate permaculture, the principles of which are
implemented at the mud hut). Reforestation doesn’t come close to
overcoming combustion of fossil fuels, as pointed out in the 30 May 2013 issue of Nature Climate Change.
Furthermore, forested ecosystems do not sequester additional carbon
dioxide as it increases in the atmosphere, as disappointingly explained in the 6 August 2013 issue of New Phytologist.

John Davies concludes:
“The world is probably at the start of a runaway Greenhouse Event which
will end most human life on Earth before 2040.” He considers only
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, not the many self-reinforcing
feedback loops described below.

Is
our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate
scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary
conclusions.

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad
Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space
scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held
annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name
participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new
milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James
Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz.
It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked?
Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities
for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from
the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the
advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked
about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors,
bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible
to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom
line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of
resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human
systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a
journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner
set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope.
Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of
people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within
the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation,
this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from
outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by
indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass
political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then
again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely
observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the
abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street –
represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic
machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social
movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant
culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re
thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling
to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that
dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but
“really a geophysics problem”.

As
it turns out, the PJI never found any cases of harassment either, but
simply considers the use of a women’s restroom by a transgender girl to
be “inherently intimidating and harassing.”

The Transadvocatereports
that the mother of the transgender student, who for privacy reasons is
referred to as “Jane Doe,” is now speaking out about how the PJI is
trying use the bogus story to paint her daughter as a sexual predator in
order to boost its campaign to repeal a California law protecting
transgender students:

When she went to her old school
as herself, Jane flourished. When asked if she had experienced any
bullying at the time she said, “Just some name calling.” Jane’s mother
elaborated, “Before she transitioned, we would go to shopping and when
she would try to use the male restroom, they would make rude comments.” I
asked her if she meant that men in the restrooms would verbally abuse
her daughter before she ever transitioned because she was perceived to
be female even when trying to present as male. “She was scared to use
the restroom. They made rude comments, language that she didn’t need to
hear just because she was trying to go to the bathroom that she thought
she had to be in.”

“Since she changed, she’s comfortable with
life. She’s really feminine, but doesn’t do tons of makeup each day.
She’s just a normal girl. If people see her on the streets, people
don’t… didn’t know, you know? Before all of this stuff happened, none of
this bothered anyone.”

When Jane’s mother refers to the “stuff
that happened,” what she means is that one of the nation’s most
influential ex-gay organizations suggested to the international press
that her daughter was predator. The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), an
ex-gay organization, needed someone to be their cautionary tale if they
hoped to fight an effective battle to end protections for trans children
in California and apparently decided that Jane fit the bill.

A
media ambush is how the school, Jane and Jane’s family learned about the
“harassment” charges. Let’s be clear about what this was: it’s a
classic media gotcha moment. Prior to this hostile media encounter,
apparently no allegations had been made about Jane.

“Jane is
private about everything. She’s timid and shy and tends to be afraid to
talk to people. That they’re saying that she’s going around harassing
people… it’s just not true. The people who are doing these stories need
to realize that the kid behind these stories has feelings and gets
hurt.”

“The
rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have
remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied,
“Yes, they have more money.”

The exchange, although it never
actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded
Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege
permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers,
hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as
Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The
Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable
commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants,
gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to
the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked
economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the
citizens too become disposable.

The public face of the oligarchic
class bears little resemblance to the private face. I, like Fitzgerald,
was thrown into the embrace of the upper crust when young. I was shipped
off as a scholarship student at the age of 10 to an exclusive New
England boarding school. I had classmates whose fathers—fathers they
rarely saw—arrived at the school in their limousines accompanied by
personal photographers (and at times their mistresses), so the press
could be fed images of rich and famous men playing the role of good
fathers. I spent time in the homes of the ultra-rich and powerful,
watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men
and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies and servants.
When the sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble there
are always lawyers, publicists and political personages to protect
them—George W. Bush’s life is a case study in the insidious affirmative
action for the rich. The rich have a snobbish disdain for the
poor—despite well-publicized acts of philanthropy—and the middle class.
These lower classes are viewed as uncouth parasites, annoyances that
have to be endured, at times placated and always controlled in the quest
to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my
loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness and sense of entitlement of
the rich, comes from living among the privileged. It was a deeply
unpleasant experience. But it exposed me to their insatiable selfishness
and hedonism. I learned, as a boy, who were my enemies.

The
inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our
gravest faults. We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling
elite by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that work
on behalf of corporations and the rich. Compliant politicians, clueless
entertainers and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture, which
holds up the rich as leaders to emulate and assures us that through
diligence and hard work we can join them, keep us from seeing the truth.“They
were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy
couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and
creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other
people clean up the mess they had made.”

Your 14-year-old daughter is dumped on your freezing front lawn in a
state of chemically induced incoherence with her shoes off and frost
stuck in her hair. She tells you she was raped. You hear her 13-year-old
best friend was also raped that same night. Your daughter is then
bullied as a tape of the incident passes around her high school. You
wait for the indictments and some semblance of justice, but they
dissipate, as one of the accused is a football star from one of the
area’s most prominent and politically connected families. The county
prosecutor drops the charges, stating that your family is refusing to
cooperate even though you are begging to be heard. Then it gets worse.

You are fired from your job without warning and the violent threats
against your family through social media increase. You have to pick up
your family and leave town. After your departure, your house is burned
to the ground. But you refuse to be intimidated.

A public outcry develops, spurred by the decision of your family to
come forward and speak out. Now, eighteen months after the incident, a
special prosecutor is looking into the case.

This is the story of Melinda Coleman, her daughter, Daisy, her friend
Paige, and Daisy Coleman's alleged rapist, Matthew Barnett, the
grandson of a longtime member of Missouri’s House of Representatives.

There are other young men as well who are under scrutiny: athlete
Jordan Zech, who allegedly filmed the assaults, and a 15-year-old whose
name we do not know—who admitted to police that 13-year-old Paige “said
no” several times, yet he refused to stop.

I do not know how Melinda Coleman has had the wherewithal to go
public, be strong, and even have to serenity to say, in advance of a
demonstration called for her family, “I do not condone violence in our
defense I don’t want others terrorized as we have been.”

I am amazed by the composure of the now 16-year-old Daisy Coleman, choosing to go public, standing up for herself and writing essays online where she shares:

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson